PROTOCOL VIOLATION DETECTED

This error showed in a trace file (udump) and caused all kind of strange errors in the user application at a customer where I was working. A quick search on metalink pointed me to Doc ID 601709.1 titled “What does the message PROTCOL VIOLATION DETECTED mean in the trace files”. The message seems to be related to bug 4669305 (which is not published by Oracle Support), but it moved me into the direction of ora-600[12333] and ora-3106. There I found as simple test case where some one in SQL*Plus had a reproducable case: select 1 from dual where rownum < ###. This caused the message to show in the trace file and complain about the bind variable value ‘###’. That looked funny as this was not a bind variable, but ofcourse the database had CURSOR_SHARING set to similar or to force. My customer had CURSOR_SHARING set to similar. Aftter we changed that to EXACT the problem went away 🙂